BEIJING – China unveils an engineering marvel this weekend: a railway to Tibet that features high-tech systems to stabilize tracks over permafrost and cabins enriched with oxygen to help riders cope with high altitudes.
Yet, as with so much else in China’s often harsh 56-year rule over Tibet, the 710-mile-long railway to the Tibetan capital has drawn controversy even before the first train departs Saturday.
Tibetans loyal to the exiled Dalai Lama and other critics say the $4.2 billion railway is part of a campaign by Beijing to crush Tibetan culture by encouraging an influx of Han Chinese, China’s majority ethnic group.
And environmental groups worry about the railway’s impact on the Tibetan highlands.
The train “will mean more environmental destruction for Tibet, more unemployment for Tibetans and of course our culture will be devastated,” said Ngawang Woeber, a member of Gu Chu Sum, a support group for former Tibetan political prisoners based in India.
Pro-independence groups plan to wear black armbands in protest and demonstrate outside Chinese embassies Saturday, a campaign they call “Reject the Railway.”
Railway official Zhu Zhensheng defended the railway, saying it will boost the Tibetan region’s economy and help people learn about its unique culture. Zhu said few Tibetans will work on the train at first, though “we hope to increase those opportunities.”
Railway Ministry officials previewed the new rail line from the city of Golmud to Lhasa on Thursday, noting it’s the world’s highest, taking the 16,500-foot passes at speeds up to 60 mph.
The line – sometimes called the “Sky Train” – is a “major achievement” that will “hugely boost local development and benefit the local people,” said Zhu, vice director of the Railway Ministry’s Tibetan Railway Office.
When construction on the line was completed last year, Chinese President Hu Jintao called it an “unprecedented triumph.”
The railway is projected to help double tourism revenues by 2010 and reduce transport costs for goods by 75 percent, the government’s Xinhua News Agency said.
Chinese officials thought about building a railway to Tibet for decades. China’s rail system reached Golmud, in Qinghai province nearly 1,865 miles from Beijing, by 1984. But railway officials said it was too difficult to extend the line to Tibet because of the region’s huge swaths of permafrost and extreme temperatures.
In 2001, the plan was resurrected. Engineers determined they could build elevated bridges over the most unstable tracts of permafrost. In other places, they could sink pipes with cooling elements into the ground to stabilize track embankments, ensuring they stayed frozen.
“It’s kind of like nonelectric refrigeration,” said Zhu.
The train cars, manufactured by Canada’s Bombardier Inc., are fitted with double-paned windows with ultraviolet filters to protect passengers from the sun’s glare and have carefully regulated oxygen levels in all classes of travel.
The trip from Beijing to the Tibetan capital will take 48 hours; officials have yet to decide if there will be daily trains.
Though the technology is new, the strategy of using trains and commerce to tamp down restive ethnic groups in China is not. Campaigns to integrate Inner Mongolia and the Muslim Xinjiang region in the far west were aided by rail links that ferried in millions of Chinese – sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not – to firm up Beijing’s control.
Despite the rosy economic forecasts and dire predictions of Chinese control, the train is unlikely to touch off social disaster or commercial windfall, said Andrew Fischer, an economics researcher at the London School of Economics.
Daily flights and overland links have given Chinese interested in Tibet a way to migrate for decades, tourism is likely to stabilize at only slightly higher than the current rates and exploiting the area’s natural reserves will remain prohibitively expensive, said Fischer.
The main reason for the project is symbolic, he said: “It’s the last frontier they have been dreaming of for the last century.”
For now, the Dalai Lama, in exile since 1959 but still the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, is taking a wait-and-see attitude.
“The railway line itself is not a cause of concern for the Tibetan people,” said Thupten Samphel, spokesman for the Dalai Lama’s government in exile. “How it will be used is the main concern.”
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